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Grow Your Wholesale Business

As I mentioned yesterday, I ran a test during the month of April to see how two similar pay-per-click online ad campaigns would fare. One of the campaigns ran on Google’s Adwords platform while the other was advertised on Facebook. Everything else was basically equal though – so how did the ads perform? I was a little shocked by the results.

The Facebook ad was shown 696 times, reaching 611 unique individuals. Not exactly an overwhelming number of people but my budget was low to begin with.

During that same timeframe, the Google Adwords campaign was shown to over 55,000 times to unique viewers. Quite a difference!

Click Through Results

What really matters though is how many of those people seeing the ad actually clicked through. The Google Adwords campaign had 517 click-throughs (a .94% click-through rate) whereas the Facebook ad didn’t have a single click-through.

Return On Investment

Obviously my return-on-investment for the Facebook ad was $0 but because no one clicked on the ad to begin with I never had to spend any money on it.

The Google Ad through cost me $132.46. Did I make that up in sales? According to my reports, I had 18 sales of the cost calculator that can be directly tied to the Google Adwords Ad which means that I had sales of $269.82 and that gives me a positive return-on-investment to the tune of $137.36.

A Few Last Things To Note

It is possible that Google actually had a higher return-on-investment via people who clicked on the ad, went to the cost calculator page, left the site and then came back to it later to purchase.

Lastly, this in no way necessarily shows that Google is more powerful than Facebook. I think one of the reasons the Google ad did so much better in this case was because people use Google when looking for solutions to problems they have and my product is a solutions-oriented one. In the past I’ve actually had good experiences selling product via Facebook. This really just goes to show you that you need to do tests with your own products and ads and determine what works best for you.

thank you for your post.. we are, at present, pondering advertising on google / facebook / other social media. our immediate product range is internet/ distance learning training courses in beauty therapy (based on my wifes 20 years experience as a trainer in that area)

I take your point about google is “people looking for solutions” rather than facebook (and people presumably looking for friends) and think you are spot on…..

ultimately, the RoI can only be measured on “how many sales did this campaign generate”

I ran a campaign for a software product aimed at naturopaths – the ad got heaps of clikcs through (it was on a national “industry” website) but not one sale…. so not success … I guess naturopaths are not into computing (yet)